A trick Gary invented was to place his loaded Model 1917 on the nightstand with a moon clip at the grip, bullet noses up. When he picked up the 1917, his little finger would slip right into the center of the full-moon clip. He now had a loaded revolver with a reload on his pinkie finger and a flashlight in his left hand. To reload, he simply opened the cylinder and ejected the fired rounds. The spare moon clip was right there on his hand. After a bit of experimentation, the fine-tuning was to pick up the revolver and moon clip, then push the moon clip onto his pinkie to make it more secure. Why the extra push? Occasionally, in practice he had the moon clip fall off in recoil.

(Right) Here you see Gary's extra-moon-clip method. (Left) If you need six more rounds, just grab the extra moon clip off of your pinkie.

.45 ACP vs. .44 SPECIAL
Caliber selection can be very personal, and I've seen shooters almost come to blows arguing the advantages of their favorites. I've had others mention that they didn't see the need for a new Model 22--the .44 Special does anything the .45 ACP does, and better. I'm not looking to "dis" the Special, but that isn't true. First, you can't use moon clips to load a .44 Special, at least not without spending a bunch of money getting your .44 Special cylinder machined for moon clips. There may be someone out there who is every bit as fast with a speedloader as the rest of us are with moon clips, but I haven't met him yet. Nothing reloads a revolver faster than 230-grain FMJ and full-moon clips. If you need more, and quickly, that's the combo you want.

"But power--the Special has more power." Yes and no.

The .44 Special, factory-loaded or reloaded to SAAMI specs, has no more power than the .45 ACP. If anything, factory ammo is slightly weaker, a 246-grain lead roundnose at 700 to 750 fps. You can easily get .45 ACP ammo that clocks more than 800 fps. Yes, traditional reloads of the .44 Special improve greatly on that, but they do so by going past SAAMI specs. Do the same thing to the .45 ACP, and you'll get the same results.

S&W M-22 Four-Inch .45 ACP
MANUFACTURER	BULLET	VELOCITY (fps)	POWER FACTOR
PMC Auto Rim	200-gr. J-SWC	735	147
PMC ACP	230-gr. FMJ	776	178
Black Hills-Blue	185-gr. JHP	979	181
Speer	230-gr. Gold Dot	806	185
Remington	230-gr. Golden Sabre	835	192
Black Hills-Blue	200-gr. L-SWC	844	168

Don't believe me? Vihtavuori shows its most ambitious .44 Special load as a 240-grain bullet at 889 fps. It shows the .45 ACP with a 230 booted out the muzzle at 935 fps. Hornady, with minor differences in the top velocity, shows us the same thing. Yes, we all know you can load a .44 Special with a 240 up past 1,000 fps. But you do so by exceeding SAAMI pressure levels. Do the same to a .45, and you get the same results. Neither of them is a magnum round, so expecting magnum-like ballistics is, at the very least, optimistic.

If you are enamored of heavy bullets, you can find heavyweights in both diameters. With pressure being the limiting factor, I don't see that going much past the standard weights gets you a whole lot. Yes, in a Ruger SuperBlackhawk in .44 Magnum you can push a 315-grain bullet 1,200 fps. But in a Special or ACP? If you want or need that much power, don't go looking at a Model 22.

For me, the speed of reloading with moon clips outweighs any nostalgia for the .44 Special. Make mine a .45. Better yet, make mine a stainless version; that way I won't have to get this one hard-chromed.